Neil Gaiman lets Whoians know what to expect in his second Doctor Who episode, “Nightmare in Sliver.”

This is definitely not just a rehash of the Cybermen whose constant stomping around can sound like an assembly-line plant that is mashing and forging out cars in Detroit. Neil Gaiman shared with the BBC that his approach was a bit more finessed.

“We’ve moved on a little bit, technologically, from the last round of Cybermen we saw, because we’re a bit further into the future. So instead of Cybermats, we’re now going to encounter Cybermites… We have to deal with various things we’ve had to deal with in the past, such as the Cybermen’s ability to take over people and transform them into Cybermen. And this time, it’s going to get very, very personal for the Doctor”

Gaiman has always had a talent for writing developed children characters. His children’s books Coraline and The Graveyard Book contain complex characters with a range of emotion. In fact, he won the Newbery Award for the latter. With “Nightmare in Silver,” we finally get to see the two children that Clara is the nanny to for an extended period of time in the episode. In the video below, it looks like Angie has some anger and control issues. We know that the Great Intelligence preys upon the minds of troubled children. Do you think that maybe Angie and her brother are potential victims?

In the last video you really wonder how Warwick Davis was going to finish his sentence. Does it give away too much of the plot?

Gaiman’s first foray into the Doctor Who universe was the wildly popular “The Doctor’s Wife,” where he explored who the TARDIS was to the Doctor, and personified her in the miss-mosh humanoid Idris. Now just because he was successful in that episode, is one of the most acclaimed sci-fi writers of all time, and is a fanatic Whovian doesn’t mean he’s interested in Steven Moffat’s job as showrunner.

When the question of taking over Doctor Who down the road was put to him, Gaiman told SFX:

“…I tend to laugh when people say ‘Would you like to be the next showrunner after Moffat?’ I don’t even have time to write an episode! You want me to be showrunner? Nothing else will happen in my entire life!

It’s certainly refreshing to know that Gaiman isn’t trying to do everything. He seems to have a healthy perspective on what his limits are, and where his talent lies. A certain amount of criticism, justified or not, has been heaped upon the doorsteps of writers such as Steven Moffat and George R.R. Martin for taking on too much, and having their work suffer as the result. It doesn’t look like Gaiman, at least at this juncture, will suffer the same criticism.